“If we had one yard to get for a first down, he was going to do anything he had to get it.
I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he just said, ‘It works for me.’ And now, he has this move where he throws his hair back when he’s sitting on the bench and his helmet is off.
He spurned the NFL draft a year ago to return for this season and has played his way into the discussion of being the top quarterback selected in the 2022 NFL draft.
He’s also attempted 342 passes, ranking him third among all Power 5 quarterbacks, and engineers the top scoring offense in all of college football.
21, is in sole possession of first place in the ACC’s Coastal Division and faces North Carolina on Thursday in a key conference showdown at Heinz Field.
It wasn’t so much fun for Duke coach David Cutcliffe last week, as Pickett passed for 473 yards and three touchdowns and ran for a touchdown in a 54-29 win over Cutcliffe’s Blue Devils.
“The players all do their pregame warm-up where they throw and work out, and I went out there purposely just to watch him,” said Cutcliffe, who coached first-rounders Peyton and Eli Manning and more recently Daniel Jones.
“He throws about as good a ball, as catchable a ball, as I’ve seen.
Sherrill should know, too.
As a player and a coach, I’ve been able to be around some great ones, and I’ll put it this way about Kenny: If he were at Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State or anywhere, he would be the starter.
When Pickett went looking for answers about his NFL stock last December, he wasn’t looking for compliments.
I have a lot of confidence in what I can do, and that’s not where I saw myself.
Only once has Pitt won 10 or more games in a season dating back to 1979 to 1981 when the Panthers won 11 games in three consecutive seasons.
Whipple coached for six seasons in the NFL and was the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterbacks coach in 2004 to 2006 and mentored Ben Roethlisberger when he broke into the league.
“He just told me that Kenny would get so much better with another year, and that’s exactly what he’s done,” Whipple said.
Pickett — who is just 112 passing yards away from overtaking Alex Van Pelt as Pitt’s all-time leading passer — is an anomaly in today’s college game and perhaps the last of his kind.
“Everybody wants to speed up the process,” Narduzzi said.
Had Pickett not been injured last season, it might have been more tempting to pull the trigger and go to the NFL.
I’m not getting cut,’ but he wanted to do it and do whatever he could to play and help this football team.
Every week, he takes his offensive linemen out to eat at the Spirits & Tales restaurant on the top floor of the Oaklander Hotel, a bill that’s covered as part of Pickett’s NIL deal with the restaurant.
During his bye week this season, Pickett went to visit Tedesco and watched him play.
Pickett and Tedesco were coached by their fathers, Ken Pickett and Pat Tedesco, all the way through youth sports.
“He had played Pop Warner with most of those kids since he was 6,” Ken Pickett said.
His dad, still sporting the flattop crew cut, was an All-American linebacker at Shippensburg University, where he was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.
And whereas Pickett liked all sports, and according to him was a lights-out shooter in basketball, he loved football.
At the start of his freshman year in high school, Pickett said he was 5-7 and around 130 pounds.
Pickett, Pitt’s career leader in total offense , thinks the main reason he wasn’t more highly recruited out of high school was because he didn’t start to grow until later.
“That was my blink reaction, “Who is this kid, because I didn’t know of him?’ But when I saw him, how gifted a passer he was and he commanded that offense, it didn’t take me long.
From the time he made his decision to return to school, Pickett has never once looked back.
“We’ve grown so much as a team, and my success here has stemmed from the team,” said Pickett, who will make his 46th career start Thursday against North Carolina.